Remember when you were growing up and you loved those days when you’d have a day off from school because of inclement weather? Those were the days. Now, students sometimes do get days off but for sinister reasons, one of them being ransomware. The education sector is still a lucrative target for threat actors, day in day out.
What’s going on?
BlueVoyant conducted research on 2702 universities across 43 countries and discovered that almost all of them faced ransomware attacks as the main cyber threat. In addition, the average cost of these attacks amounted to $447,000 in 2020. Apart from ransomware attacks, data breaches were pretty harrowing for the sector too, affecting 200 universities over a span of two years.
Attack surface facts
The attacks increased as academic institutions shifted to remote learning and teaching, leaving their networks vulnerable to threat actors.
Credentials of university students are in high demand in underground marketplaces, imploring hackers to launch these attacks.
Academic institutions often find themselves in the scope of attacks due to the lack of cybersecurity training and awareness, scarcity of resources, and low educational budgets.
Some stats your way
Of all the institutions analyzed, 66% lack basic email security posture.
Open RDP ports are still a cause of concern as more than three-quarters of these colleges and universities have open/unsecured remote desktop ports.
Inbound botnet targeting has been observed in 86% ..
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